From the author of

If you've been following my musings here on InformIT for the last
several weeks, you know that I'm a firm believer in a decentralized, free
Net. In fact, I've been beating this particular drum—that the World
Wide Web as we know it today will go the way of the carrier pigeon—for
years, based solely on my intuitive opinion.

How I do love to pontificate!

Since 1998, this idea has been championed by the creators of Napster,
Gnutella, and recently
Morpheus,
LimeWire, and
BearShare. To add
insult to injury, these applications, which give anyone the ability to trade
material (copyrighted or otherwise) over the Net, are themselves free to
download and use.

The free Netcamp declares that today's digital technology sweeps
aside any attempts to regulate it. And that, gentle reader, is the beauty
for those who believe in a free Net—and the problem for those wanting to
control it.

Writing in the September issue of Technology Review, Charles Mann
fired a volley across the free Net movement's bow by arguing—and quite
well—that the Net is controllable and governable, and information can be
blocked. He took issue with free Netheads (like myself) by debunking the
following "myths":

The Internet is too internationalized to be controlled.

The Internet is too interconnected to be controlled.

The Internet is too filled with hackers to be controlled.

I give Mr. Mann credit for a well-written and lucid argument—but
he's wrong. So I turned to my esteemed colleague Jean François
at MagnusNet for
his take on Mann's position and, with his help, here's what we arrived
at.

The Internet Is Too Internationalized to Be Controlled

Mann claims that information carried on the Net can be filtered and
blocked by countries. That's not entirely true. If the country wants to do
any e-commerce at all, it must keep open at least one port—port 443. This
is the port that SSL (secure socket layer) uses for e-commerce on the web. The
data going through this port is encrypted. That means that any
data—e-commerce related or otherwise—can be sent through this port. If
it were encrypted, the controlling country wouldn't know whether the data
was an e-commerce packet or some other form of information—even information
that goes against the party line.

In addition, POP and IMAP ports used for email can also be SSL-enabled, so
unwanted information can be sent through these ports and right under the noses
of the controlling bureaucracy. They could close these ports, but that would cut
them off from email and the e-commerce world—for all practical purposes,
turning them into an intranet.

That's called cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Mann also argues that offshore havens for computers serving illegal
information to the information-starved masses in tightly controlled countries
such as China or those in the Middle East will eventually fail for simple
bandwidth reasons. Basically, the small offshore countries where these servers
can be set up cannot handle the increasing traffic as the site becomes more and
more popular. Sooner or later, they have to move their servers to or at least
near a Net backbone (for example, somewhere in North America or Europe), and
that backbone would be in a country where the illegal servers can be discovered
and controlled. But using mirror sites—even low-bandwidth sites—solves
the clogged bandwidth problem by spreading the load between multiple hosts. And
even if the illegal servers exist in a controlled or controllable county,
information can be passed to others in ways that are almost impossible to
trace.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is one such way. Using an IRC channel, multiple
servers can be used as distributed nodes. A dynamic dialup ISP, where an IP
address changes each time you log onto the Net, would be extremely difficult to
block. Here's an example. A user enters an IRC channel and says that he has
files for downloading at a certain server. He gives the IP address of the server
and says that the files will be available only for a brief time. Users can then
go to that IP address and download the information. If a controlling party
attempts to track its source and filter that IP address, the offending party can
use a dialup ISP that assigns a new IP address every time a person logs on.